Google – Word of the decade

You know you have a successful product when it is related to the Word of the Year and Word of the Decade. Twitter’s popularity got some props from the American Dialect Society. For the past twenty years, the society votes for what it believes to be the word of the year. For 2009, the winning word was “tweet” which should be treated as a noun and refers to the short message users send using the Twitter service.

For the bigger honor, Word of the Decade, accolades went to “google”. Not the company, but rather the verb meaning to search the Internet. Funny enough, Grant Barrett, chair of the New Words Committee for the society, thought that decade honors would go to the word “blog”, but alas he conceded that more people probably “google” than “blog”.

Microsoft must have been envious of Google to have such a cool name that it would eventually become a verb. MSN Search or Windows Live Search just didn’t flow which is probably what led to Microsoft rebranding their search to just Bing. After all, one could replace “google” with “bing” in a sentence. For example, I went on the Internet to “bing” an old friend. Um, on second thought I think I will stick with “google”.